Ratings for the Market Oriented Smallholder Agriculture Project (MOSAP) for Angola were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, the risk to development outcome was moderate, the Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was also moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach to agricultural extension was effective in enhancing smallholder farmers’ capacity to generate and use new knowledge and adopt improved agricultural practices and technology. A capable and internationally experienced service provider will be required to help farmers’ organizations develop and implement investment proposals, especially for value chain investments. The use of small, local service providers to assist farmers’ associations in the preparation and implementation of MOSAP subprojects was problematic because of their limited technical and organizational capacity. Improving the quality of technical and commercial assistance and making it available to a much larger number of beneficiaries will require recruitment of a highly capable and internationally experienced service provider who will also train the local NGOs and private sector subcontractors with whom they will work. During MOSAP implementation, the project had difficulty finding local qualified professionals to effectively undertake the fiduciary and M&E functions. The lack of qualified procurement staff was in part responsible for the delayed start of project implementation. While hiring was possible within a reasonable period, the selected consultants were not familiar with World Bank procedures.
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Ratings for the Khammouane Development Project for Lao were as follows: outcomes were moderately satisfactory, the risk to development outcome was substantial, the Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was also moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: line agencies, when provided with appropriate training, supervision and guidance, can efficiently implement complex programs such as the establishment and operations of a fully decentralized, participatory mechanism for the delivery of public investment and services. The involvement and commitment of beneficiaries in all aspects of an activity, from planning to implementation and monitoring, is necessary to engender a sense of ownership among key stakeholders and ensure buy-in, efficient implementation and sustainability. This was demonstrated under the project by the strong support from beneficiary communities for DDF investments, the satisfactory functioning of the restructured WUAs for O&M, including cost recovery from members of the rehabilitated irrigation perimeters, and the pro-poor targeting of the livelihood grants. Strategic plans for transformation of the public agricultural research and extension centers such as XBF Center may need to include the objectives of becoming more market, oriented and self-financed, but they also need to acknowledge the public nature of many critical goods that these public institutions provide, which require the continued public funding.
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Male outmigration, the globalization of agri-food systems, conflict, and pandemic human disease have all been linked to changes in rural economies, changes in women’s roles in the agricultural sector, and consequently to assertions that agriculture is “feminizing.”
... See More + This review assesses the global evidence surrounding the feminization of agriculture. First, it proposes a number of indicators to track the feminization of agriculture, noting that although limited data exist for some of the indicators, efforts should be expanded to collect data for all of them to provide better diagnostics of women’s work in agriculture and their welfare. Next, it critically examines the factors that may lead to the feminization of agriculture and evaluates the empirical evidence on each factor worldwide. The review concludes by identifying policy imperatives based on the evidence on women’s roles in agriculture in the context of rural transformation
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Maintaining permanent coverage of the soil using crop residues is an important and commonly recommended practice in conservation agriculture. Measuring this practice is an essential step in improving knowledge about the adoption and impact of conservation agriculture.
... See More + Different data collection methods can be implemented to capture the field level crop residue coverage for a given plot, each with its own implications for the survey budget, implementation speed, and respondent and interviewer burden. This study tests six alternative methods of crop residue coverage measurement among the same sample of rural households in Ethiopia. The relative accuracy of these methods is compared against a benchmark, the line-transect method. The alternative methods compared against the benchmark include: (i) interviewee (respondent) estimation; (ii) enumerator estimation visiting the field; (iii) interviewee with visual-aid without visiting the field; (iv) enumerator with visual-aid visiting the field; (v) field picture collected with a drone and analyzed with image-processing methods; and (vi) satellite picture of the field analyzed with remote sensing methods. Results of the methodological experiment show that survey-based methods tend to underestimate field residue cover. When quantitative data on cover are needed, the best estimates are provided by visual-aid protocols. For categorical analysis (such as greater than 30 percent cover or not), visual-aid protocols and remote sensing methods perform equally well. Among survey-based methods, the strongest correlates of measurement errors are total farm size, field size, distance, and slope. The results deliver a ranking of measurement options that can inform survey practitioners and researchers.
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Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) varieties have important nutritional differences and there is strong interest to identify nutritionally superior varieties for dissemination.
... See More + In agricultural household surveys, this information is often collected based on the farmer's self-report. However, recent evidence has demonstrated the inherent difficulties in correctly identifying varieties from self-report information. This study examines the accuracy of self-report information on varietal identification from a data capture experiment on sweet potato varieties in southern Ethiopia. Three household-based methods of identifying varietal adoption are tested against the benchmark of DNA fingerprinting: (A) elicitation from farmers with basic questions for the most widely planted variety; (B) farmer elicitation on five sweet potato phenotypic attributes by showing a visual-aid protocol; and (C) enumerator recording observations on five sweet potato phenotypic attributes using a visual-aid protocol and visiting the field. The reference being the DNA fingerprinting, about 30 percent of improved varieties were identified as local or non-improved, and 20 percent of farmers identified a variety as local when it was in fact improved. The variety names given by farmers delivered inconsistent and fuzzy varietal identities. The visual-aid protocols employed in methods B and C were better than method A, but still way below the adoption estimates given by the DNA fingerprinting method. The findings suggest that estimating the adoption of improved varieties with methods based on farmer self-reports is questionable, and point toward a wider use of DNA fingerprinting, likely to become the gold standard for crop varietal identification.
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Feedback tools have become ubiquitous in the service industry and social development programs alike. This study designed a field experiment to test whether eliciting feedback can empower users and increase demand for a service.
... See More + The study randomly assigned different feedback tools in the context of an agricultural service to document their impact on clients' demand and shed light on the underlying mechanisms. The analysis shows large demand effects, in the current and following growing periods. It also documents large demand effect spillovers, as other non-client farmers in the vicinity of treated groups are more likely to sign up for the service. To disentangle pure supply-side monitoring from demand-side accountability effects, additional monitoring was randomly announced to extension workers across treatment and control communities. Extension workers do not exert significantly more effort in villages where additional monitoring takes place. The study concludes that farmers’ taste for "respect" leads their higher demand for the service.
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The objective of the Smallholder Agriculture Development Project (SADP) is to increase marketed output among project beneficiaries in Lesotho’s smallholder agriculture sector.
... See More + The changes to the SADP have been requested by the Kingdom of Lesotho’s Ministry of Finance through its letter dated May 4, 2016. These changes are due to: the slow disbursement rates of some sub-components; the increased demand for other sub-components; the changing priorities in the country’s agricultural landscape; and, the El Nino drought emergency in Lesotho.
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The development objective of the Rajasthan Agricultural Competitiveness Project for India is to establish, at scale, the feasibility of a distinct agricultural development approach that helps farmers to get more rupees per unit of water, in compensation for using fewer units of water by integrating water management and agricultural technology, farmer organizations, and market innovations in selected locations across the ten agro-ecological zones of Rajasthan capable of sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and farmer incomes.
... See More + The second level of restructuring include: (i) change to applicable procurement guideline and institutional responsibilities; (ii) change in implementation arrangement; and (iii) change in financial management, specifically flow of project fund that will now follow country system. In financing, it is now clear that most of the project activities will be implemented in the remaining project implementation period of about three years. In addition, the project suffered substantial delays in disbursement. To account for the delays, disbursement estimate will be revised to reflect and account for an improved projection of disbursement. The total amount includes actual disbursement from financial year 2012 to 2016 and the estimated disbursement from financial year 2017 to 2019 based on available funds (of US$ 97,558,501.00). However, at the forthcoming MTR (currently schedule in July/August 2016), the disbursement estimates would be further reviewed and revised as appropriate.
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Ratings for the Agricultural Productivity Project for Africa were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, the risk to development outcome was high, the Bank performance was satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was also satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: the impact of agriculture research activities can be enhanced when other links in the value chain such as extension, seed multiplication and agriculture inputs are integrated into the overall strategic project design. In planning and setting up regional projects, substantial preparation time should be allowed to have all parties agree on how to proceed and determine respective roles. This competitiveness could be a force either for protecting one’s own research turf and focusing inward, or to try to outperform each other in terms of implementation and creation of new technologies, or both. The Project design steered competitiveness away from defending turf and toward mutually beneficial regional cooperation/competition as part of preparation by providing for multi-lateral meetings to negotiate how Project resources would be used, which country would be specializing in which commodity and supporting frequent regional exchanges of scientists and technicians to help understand each other’s work. The strategy envisioned that once these exchanges had been underway for a time, the potential for defensiveness would give way to cooperation and healthy competition that would ensure that the project’s targets would be met. Research focus on regionally identified and prioritized production issues leads to quick results due to the strong collaboration and sharing of knowledge.
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Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural poor, by building on the limited resources farming households already possess.
... See More + It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from farmers' maize and rice fields, and comparisons with Asia, this paper examines why the set of technologies promoted to date have produced localized successes rather than transformational change. The paper explains the limitations of alternative policies that are not centered on small farms. It provides indicative examples of how resource-management technologies can supplement seed-fertilizer technologies to speed an African Green Revolution.
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The development objective of Sustainable Management of Agricultural Research and Technology Dissemination (SMARTD) Project for Indonesia is to improve the institutional capacity and performance of the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD) to develop and disseminate relevant and demand-driven innovative technologies, meeting the needs of producers and of the agri-food system.
... See More + This restructuring addresses the agreed modifications of the project activities, during the Mid-term Review (MTR) and subsequent implementation support missions, which include the addition of IAARD laboratories and field stations in new locations and budget allocations to enhance implementation effectiveness and efficiency gains. The changes will also ensure that the Project Development Objective (PDO) is achieved during the 21-month extended implementation period. Furthermore, the proposed modifications are in line with the changes in the Government Policy directions and priorities since the project was designed in 2011 and that of the World Bank's Indonesia Country Partnership Framework (CPF) for 2015 to 2018-2019 period addressing the agriculture sector investments. The closing date has been extended to June 30, 2019.
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There is by now substantial consensus within the development community over the need for a more climate smart agriculture, which consists of three defining principles: enhancing agriculture’s resilience to climate change, reducing agricultural green-house gas emissions, and sustainably increasing production.
... See More + With 795 million people still not getting their minimum dietary requirements, there is little scope for trade-offs between increasing production and improving agriculture’s environmental impacts. Making climate smart agriculture operational will rely on our ability to measure production, resilience, and emissions in a way that informs decision makers about the policies, technologies, and practices that most effectively promotes each. In addition to the direct results of an improved activity or practice, longer term outcomes can lead to fundamental changes in the way that producers, consumers, investors, and others behave—and what they base their production, consumption, and investment decisions on. The indicators described in this document were developed for this purpose. Applying the indicators to examine the agricultural performance of different countries reveals a number of correlates relating to institutions, legal frameworks, and the relationships between agriculture and other sectors like water and energy. Applying them to projects affirms the important advantages of approaches that employ appropriate technologies and that incorporate broader, landscape-based perspectives that recognize and allow for competing demands for land and water resources. The type of highly practical empirical evidence that will be amassed by monitoring these indicators is going to be pivotal in mitigating agriculture’s large ecological foot-print, in capitalizing on its potential to provide environmental services, and in guiding the forms of intensification that lead to substantially higher and more sustainable production.
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